Since I know that there are a few new readers of this blog, I will quickly explain what entries tagged "CSUN2006" are. There is aconference with a really long name that I'm not remembering fullyI, and most of the others I know, refer to it as CSUN. It's a conference on technology and disabilities. There are lots of shiny new toys, and cool presentations on everything fromAccessible Poker and Crazy Eightsto the heavy academic stuff. This was my first time at the conference, and the following entry is the last session I went to. If I get unlazy, all of the entries pertaining to the sessions and experiences at the conference will beTaggedfor the conference.

This was definitely a cool session. The presenters were fromThe Sendero Groupwhich makes GPS which runs on the BrailleNote (the accessible PDA I use for class and everything else except when I use my laptop). They were demonstrating all of these cool ways they can help with navigation indoors. The coolest thing to me were the talking lights. Basically, they're lights that flicker in a way that we can't see. These lights are then put at strategic locations (outside the restaurant in a hotel for example). Using an optical sensor, they can then tell you when you're near that land mark. The balasts they need for these lights are maybe $3 or so, so it's a workable solution.

I've often thought that it would be cool to have GPS for the BrailleNOte, but haven't had the money for it. I can see lots of uses for it, especially on a quiet college campus, or downtown when I want to know where the nearest coffee shop is. If, as they hope, the navigation systems they showed are a workable solution, I will be drooling even more.

Well, this is the last session I'm going to report on.GW Micro'ssession on Window Eyes was good, but since I missed a lot of it, I don't think I'll be able to report on it now. I hope these entries were at least somewhat helpful to someone.

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Comments

Hi Nickie! Liz here from I Speak of Dreams (http://lizditz.typepad.com) Thanks for your comment on my blog. I get so angry about things like that idiot in Connecticut.

CSUN stands for California State University at Northridge Technology and Persons With Disability Conference--no wonder you couldn't remember it. I didn't know about it -- my "beat" is mostly learning disabilities--some really interesting stuff there.

Thanks too for the link (on a previous post) to the "making your blog accessible to the blind (http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=4&TopicID=167&DocumentID=2757)" presentation. I don't use that many images in blogging. I use Typepad for blogging, and it doesn't give me an easy way to add an alt tag. I don't always -- well, hardly ever--add descriptions to the images I use. Instead I try to use descriptive names for the images.